Greta Lee has just indulged in her first few days off in seven weeks, and she has the stains to prove it.
“I have to show you,” she says, reaching into her bag to pull out her phone. Soon she’s swiping through pictures of pomegranates, grown in her backyard in Los Angeles, freshly harvested and bursting at the seams. After several weeks spent traveling for work, Lee went right to her home garden with a glass of wine and some cheese and olives, “and I just peeled,” she says, lifting her purple-stained fingertips as evidence.
Dressed in a fringed Dries Van Noten top that was the talk of school drop-off earlier, menswear trousers, beat up New Balances and a Marlo bag from The Row, Lee has the whole nonchalant, effortlessly cool movie star thing going on in spades. But just as you’re about to find her intimidating, she’s back to talking about the pomegranates she’s grown, and how the few days off she has have been spent getting her hands dirty.
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“There’s a proper way to do it to section them up, and I get the kids involved and it’s really great. It’s very meditative,” she says, reclined on a couch on-set on a warm late-fall day. ”It’s a really nice contrast for me, and I go straight into the garden and I’m serious about it. The day I got back from the ‘Tron: Ares’ press tour, I sent this [picture] to my whole team of the full harvest: Mexican limes and all the tomatoes are still growing, we have African basil, lemon verbena, onions, and the pomegranates, and there’s more stuff too,” she adds, showing off the pictures like a proud parent. “I know, right? Eat your heart out, Meghan Markle.”
Lee, who grew up in Los Angeles, moved back in 2020 to join the second season of “The Morning Show,” after living for years in New York. Five years in, she’s finally feeling like she’s out of the adjustment period and is finding “real roots” in L.A., as literally seen in her backyard garden.
“Each time I go back to New York, it hurts a little bit less,” she says. “I grew up in L.A., but my whole adult life happened in New York. That’s where my whole career started, where my husband and I got married, we had our kids there, so that was a lot of heartbreak to have to move.”
There’s a nice full-circle feeling, though, to being back in her hometown for this moment in her career.
“Oh, it’s so emotional. We live up on this hill, so I can see La Cañada, where I grew up, and I can see the city, and there’s a lot of opportunity to reflect and try to process what’s been happening,” she says.
What’s happening is that after years of scene-stealing in shows like “Girls” and “Russian Doll,” Lee, 42, has become a full-fledged leading lady. Everything changed with “Past Lives,” the Celine Song debut feature that premiered at Sundance in January 2023 and went on to earn an Oscar nomination for best picture in 2024. “Past Lives,” which follows a young woman named Nora from her childhood in South Korea to adulthood in New York City, is the kind of movie that to this day, while on the road promoting other movies Lee is stopped by people to discuss the film. It was a project that redefined her career and led to a wave of new work, much of which was on display this fall including “Tron: Ares,” the third in the sci-fi action franchise, Kathryn Bigelow’s political thriller “A House of Dynamite” and the Willem Dafoe-led indie drama “Late Fame,” along with the fourth season of “The Morning Show,” which she joined in Season Two.
After roughly 20 years of being an actor, this fall marked the first global press tour Lee has been on.
“It surprised me that there’s a way to do it where you can hold onto yourself,” she says of the tour. “I think because of my atypical journey and having worked so long before I had ever been in a movie like ‘Tron’ and before I’d ever been on a proper world tour, and I’ve observed it from the outside for so long that now finally getting to do it, and doing it with my people, is so nice. And I think it’s really been inspiring to me to know that you can carve out your way and curate it to meet your own sensibilities.”
“Even if ‘Past Lives’ hadn’t happened, we all knew that Greta was going to bloom and grow,” says her costar in “The Morning Show” Karen Pittman. “You just knew it because it was a given. At some point, there was going to be a moment, because she’s just incredibly talented…you can’t help but see the sort of butterfly aspect of who she is. It doesn’t matter where she goes with her work or with her art, or whether she’s going to act or be a muse for someone in their creativity as a director.”
In tandem with Lee’s rise in Hollywood has been her arrival as a fashion star, cemented with ambassadorships for Dior and Tiffany this year. She has worked with stylist Danielle Goldberg for years, after meeting on a job and later reconnecting during a shoot for The Wing’s publication. Lee was pregnant when they first started working together and she was immediately drawn to the way Goldberg approached maternity style.
“This was before Rihanna was out there making maternity dressing what it is now. It wasn’t cool. I wasn’t in crop tops showing off my bump,” Lee says. “But she found an archival Balenciaga dress with these thigh-high boots. It was so amazing. She’s a woman, and she understands: it’s not about trying to contort yourself into some sort of unrealistic framework. We’re just trying to dress for ourselves.”
“The way Greta and I work is very much of one mind,” Goldberg says. “We have a language that has become second hand at this point and more often than not I see one look and send it to her for that specific event and the fitting is done. We have a way of working together that is in some ways difficult to explain but really goes back to a decade of collaboration. Everything is done with intention and with a great deal of trust.”
The reference is always changing, but Lee and Goldberg are often inspired by “different women who have a storied past and have a really not casual relationship with fashion, and something that feels intellectual too,” Lee says. “So it’s not just about, I don’t know, looking hot. Although that could be fun too.”
Toward the end of his tenure at Loewe, Lee connected with designer Jonathan Anderson and appeared in campaigns for the brand. Shortly after his arrival at Dior, she was announced as a face of the brand in September.
“Dior felt to me one of those really out-of-reach brands,” she says. “Dior arguably is the pinnacle of elevated fashion and it represented femininity and luxury and all the things growing up as a middle class immigrant kid. I had knockoff Dior slides and things like that was such a score and such an out-of-reach thing. So then to do this now and to be an ambassador is really surreal. But again, it fits into this whole story where it feels like there’s this chance to make it our own and make it something new and make it something meaningful, too. And that I know isn’t always the case. So all of these relationships and the connections that we have to each other, really, I think it feeds into the work. It’s so not casual.”
“When I first met Greta I instantly fell in love. She’s someone I could tell anything to,” Anderson writes. “She is one of the great talents of her generation. I think she’s incredibly gifted. When she wears Dior I see her as a new vision for the house. From my side as a designer, she is a pleasure to work with as she knows herself and how to wear clothing. She becomes the silhouette.”
It wasn’t all that long ago, Lee recalls, that she was “begging certain designers to loan me something” or waiting in line to try and get into a show. Now, as a face of Dior, that certainly is a thing of the past, but she and Goldberg consciously wanted to be inclusive of their past together on this most recent press tour.
“The designers that we got to showcase are all near and dear to us, and so many New York designers who I feel like I came up with: Eckhaus Latta, Colleen [Allen], I loved her for so long, and even in a lot of ways, Jonathan [Anderson] — we really share a similar kind of feeling like we’ve been around for a while, but being honestly just amazed to find ourselves where we are right now,” Lee says.
“I always try to be the type of person, for my own sanity, to not code switch basically, and turn into a completely different person. I bring all of my stains, literally and figuratively, with me everywhere I go,” she continues. “And when I do red carpet, I’m very much feeling like the woman I am at the farm, even though it’s from the outside so entirely different, but I think it’s more and more of that because red carpet too is such a huge monster of this industrial complex, it’s so easy to get lost and feel like you don’t have your own signature on the looks you’re putting out. And it goes by so fast. My biggest fear is always that I’m not in the moment and unable to appreciate it.”
One of the biggest factors in her staying present is a life free from social media, which she deleted back in 2020.
“[Deleting it] was more of an experiment, and I never looked back. It completely changed my perspective on so many things, and actually now, after each event I never look at the photos, ever,” she says. “It’s so much more about the experience for me, and I’m seriously trying to protect the feeling of going out and being there together, your outfit and listening to music and how much I got out of that.”
When “Past Lives” was gaining momentum, there was some internal talk about her logging back on, a conversation that lasted “maybe two minutes.” But it wouldn’t have felt authentic to Lee, and the beauty of getting to have her big Hollywood moment at this state in her life means she knows exactly what she wants.
“It’s like if I’m willing to do all this, how can I do it in a way that still feels like me and fits in with my values?” she says. “And even if I’m not perfect about it, what I aspire to look like.”
For the first time in a few years, Lee has intentionally not signed on to the next future project as an actor. After this fall’s three movies and new “The Morning Show” season, she has a movie called “11817” still to release, “and that is enough,” she says. “I feel like it’s time to sit for a moment. The industry is in such a funny place to me. I feel like movies are dying and that’s a really dire thing. And I’m committed and invested in that medium, and I just want to be really deliberate about the next steps,” she adds. “It’s so odd though because this is the time when maybe I shouldn’t be because there’s so much coming my way for the first time. But it’s been nice to say no.”
She has signed on to direct her first feature, an adaptation of Monika Kim’s bestseller “The Eyes Are the Best Part,” which is still in the early stages.
“I’m working on that, but there’s some other levels of a video game that I need to defeat before I can even think about that project,” she says.
Directing has never been something on her wish list, but the psychological horror got under her skin.
“It’s something that sometimes I think I want to do less and less, the more I know,” she says of directing. “But I do think that if there’s a certain story or a certain world where you feel like it’s not a choice, that’s basically where I’m at with this. It’s not something that I was actively seeking out and it came to me and then it was something that became obsessive and I can’t let go of.”
So she remains open to whatever comes next, without a wish list or agenda.
“I had lived where it felt so much about checking off boxes. And to be free from that feels very weird and very exciting, and scary, but weird,” she says. “And now it’s just about the different filmmakers that I want to work with, and being surprised by the things that come my way.”
